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The C Word

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June 8, 2009

I always find it amusing when politicians adopt the catch phrases and other expressions, obviously created by their lobbyist/puppeteers.  One of my favorites is “foreign oil”, as in:  “We need to end our dependence on foreign oil”.  Do they expect people to believe that Jesus made our oil different from that “Muslim oil”, which causes air pollution?  The expression:  “foreign oil” is obviously being used to vilify Arab countries for last year’s inflated gasoline prices, caused by oil speculators and American oil companies.  (Let’s not forget the price gouging by gasoline retailers.)  Most Americans realize that we have a serious problem with our dependence on petroleum products and, more generally fossil fuels, including coal, as sources of energy.  According to a March, 2009 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans are “worried a great deal or fair amount” by global warming.  Although this is down from last year’s 66 percent, 76 percent of Americans are “worried a great deal or fair amount” by air pollution itself, independent of the global warming consequences (according to the same poll).

Attention is increasingly focused on the concept of “clean coal” as an energy source.  In his February 24 address to the Joint Session of Congress, President Obama made it clear that he supported Congressional financing of the development of “clean coal” as a viable energy source.  The timing seemed intended to coincide with the aggressive advertising campaign against “clean coal”.  In case you’re wondering just what “clean coal” is  .  .  .  Ben Elgin wrote an article for Business Week last year, entitled:  “The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal”.  Here’s some of what he had to say:

The catch is that for now — and for years to come — “clean coal” will remain more a catchphrase than a reality.  Despite the eagerness of the coal and power industries to sanitize their image and the desire of U.S. politicians to push a healthy-sounding alternative to expensive foreign oil and natural gas, clean coal is still a misnomer.

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Corporations and the federal government have tried for years to accomplish “carbon capture and sequestration.”  So far they haven’t had much luck.  The method is widely viewed as being decades away from commercial viability.  Even then, the cost could be prohibitive:  by a conservative estimate, several trillion dollars to switch to clean coal in the U.S. alone.

Then there are the safety questions.  One large, coal-fired plant generates the equivalent of 3 billion barrels of CO2 over a 60-year lifetime.  That would require a space the size of a major oil field to contain.  The pressure could cause leaks or earthquakes, says Curt M. White, who ran the U.S. Energy Dept.’s carbon sequestration group until 2005 and served as an adviser until earlier this year.  “Red flags should be going up everywhere when you talk about this amount of liquid being put underground.”

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Companies seeking to build dozens of coal-fueled power plants across the country use the term “clean coal” liberally in trying to persuade regulators and voters.

Needless to say, President Obama’s advocacy on behalf of the “clean coal” lobby has outraged more than a few people.  Will Harlan wrote an article for the March 20 edition of Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine, entitled:  “The Dirty Truth Behind Obama’s ‘Clean Coal’ Stimulus”.  In addition to addressing the problems yet to be overcome with carbon capture, as well as the problems associated with mountaintop removal mining, sludge spills, dam breaches, poisoned wells, skyrocketing cancer rates, childhood asthma, premature deaths, slurry ponds, coal ash waste and mercury emissions, Harlan pointed out that:

Obama has also committed to reviving a boondoggle coal facility that even the Bush Administration decided to kill:  the FutureGen Carbon Capture and Storage Plant, which just happens to be located in Obama’s home state of Illinois.  Even though the facility costs have soared well beyond budget, and it is nowhere close to developing cost-effective technologies to safely capture and store carbon, Obama continues to support it.

Why are we letting Obama get away with greenwashing coal by perpetuating the “clean coal” myth?  The Democrats received close to $1 million in “contributions” in 2008 from the coal mining industry.  And southern Illinois is part of the country’s coal belt.

Eugene Robinson deserves a hat tip for his June 5 Washington Post column, criticizing Obama’s stance on this issue.  The strongest point made by Robinson was the cost/benefit analysis:

The Obama administration is spending $2.4 billion from the stimulus package on carbon capture and storage projects — a mere down payment.  Imagine what that money could do if it were spent on solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.  Imagine if we actually tried to solve the problem rather than bury it.

It should come as no surprise that the Greenpeace website would feature an essay, critical of “clean coal” with the following conclusion:

“Clean coal” is an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables.  Existing CCTs do nothing to mitigate the environmental effects of coal mining or the devastating effects of global warming.  Coal is the dirtiest fuel there is and belongs in the past.  Much higher emission cuts can be made using currently available natural gas, wind and modern biomass that are already in widespread use.  Clean, inexpensive.  This is where investment should be directed, rather than squandering valuable resources on a dirty dinosaur.

Nevertheless, what does come as a surprise is that the very same article quoted above appears on Barack Obama’s Campaign for America website.  In case you’re wondering how to reconcile that point of view with Obama’s enthusiasm for “clean coal”, you have to read the disclaimer appearing at the end of the article on the Campaign for America site:

Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign.

In other words:  “Don’t be dumb enough to believe that President Obama is really going to support anything you read here”.

In his June 4 opinion piece for The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne observed how the media are:

… largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.

This was brought home at this week’s annual conference of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.

To the objective observer, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Barack Obama is as much of a hypocrite as any other politician who found his way to the White House.

This Should Have Happened Last Year

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September 18, 2008

I’m sorry.  What is happening in the financial markets right now, should have happened at this time, last year.  I put my money where my mouth was, in the belief that a laissez-faire Republican government would have let market conditions run their course.  That strategy caused me to lose money for the past year.  When precious metals should have been going up, they were going down.  Something “stinky” was happening.  At this time, last year, Jon Markman of msn.com was discussing the “duct tape and pixie dust” being used to hold the economy together.  In hindsight, I suspect that there may have been an effort to keep the ca-ca from hitting the fan until after Election Day (November 4).  Time will tell whether there was some skullduggery involved in such an effort.  Do you think that the “oil speculators” realized, at some point, that they could manipulate the prices of the small handful of stocks (30) that comprise the Dow Jones Industrials, by manipulating the price of oil?  Are these same “oil speculators” on “good behavior” right now, out of fear that the “Enron Loophole” could be doomed?

I apologize because I have been making (back) lots of money this week, while many people have seen their retirement plans crash and burn.  I stuck to my belief that the emperor was not really wearing any clothes.  It cost me money to adhere to that opinion, although it is now “payback time”.  To no surprise, the Carly Fiorinas of this nosedive will walk away with their golden parachutes intact.  However, will AIG still be free to make crucial decisions about which lawsuits to litigate?  Do they have a right to make those (and other) decisions as they used to, now that you and I own eighty percent of that company?

Meanwhile, John “Keating Five” McCain claims that he will champion the interests of those suckers who vote for him, by bringing “The Good Old Boys of Wall Street” to Alaskan frontier justice.  Why would anyone believe this?  Based on his record, McCain could not expect the voters to consider him as the advocate of the downtrodden.  For some reason, the Obama campaign has expressed an unwillingness to use the “Keating Five” episode of McCain’s life, as fodder for negative ads.  (They may find themselves thinking more clearly in late October.)

Let’s take a look back at the “glory days” of The Keating Five, from what is available on Wikipedia.org:

The Keating Five scandal was prompted by the activities of one particular savings and loan: Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California. Lincoln’s chairman was Charles Keating, who ultimately served five years in prison for his corrupt mismanagement of Lincoln.  In the four years since Keating’s American Continental Corporation (ACC) had purchased Lincoln in 1984, Lincoln’s assets had increased from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion.  Such savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors’ money, a change of which Keating took advantage.  Lincoln’s investments took the form of buying land, taking equity positions in real estate development projects, and buying high-yield junk bonds.

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The core allegation of the Keating Five affair is that Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators. The regulators backed off, to later disastrous consequences.

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(f)ive senators, Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI), were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).

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After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”.  All five of the senators involved served out their terms. Only Glenn and McCain ran for re-election, and they were both re-elected.

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McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981, and McCain was the closest socially to Keating of the five senators. Like DeConcini, McCain considered Keating a constituent as he lived in Arizona. Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain’s wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard Keating’s jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. On his Keating Five experience, McCain has said: “The appearance of it was wrong. It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

So where is the Obama ad using “Poor Judgment” as its theme?  Wouldn’t it be nice to see that phrase repeated under a picture of Sarah Palin?